Brian Denenberg is an angel investor, company advisor, and co-founder. Here, he discusses some of the companies he has been involved with, including Fairmarkit, Tive, and well as his work at Venture Lane Studio helping startups grow sales.
Highlights:
Sal Daher Introduces Brian Denenberg
Fairmarkit
How Fairmarkit Was Started
Tive
Inbound vs Outbound Marketing
"... What Tive did, he innovated a tracker that goes on shipments, and it could go anywhere in the world, and it could not just tell you where the shipment was. It could tell you the condition of the shipment..."
"... Scientists don't know the huge difference that exists between the lab and the clinic and industry. There's a massive gap and they think that something that works in the lab will work in a clinic or an industry very easily, but it mostly does not..."
Venture Lane Studio
"... We call it a studio. It gives us the flexibility to work in different ways. The best way to think of it is like an accelerator. It's really bespoke. We take three to four companies at a time. We're not looking to doing big cohorts..."
Cedience
CIRT
Qase
Brian's Background
How Brian Got into Startups
Advice to the Audience
ANGEL INVEST BOSTON IS SPONSORED BY:
Transcript of “Helping Startups Grow”
Guest: Brian Denenberg
Sal Daher: Hey, this is Sal Daher. I'm delighted you found the Angel Invest Boston podcast in which I interview people who know a lot about building technology startups. I now have a Substack about losing and keeping off 100 pounds of body weight in my 60s. It's called Aging Fit, and my goal is to build a community of people interested in keeping fit as they age. Look for Sal Daher on substack.com. Daher, by the way, is spelled Delta, Alpha, Hotel, Echo, Romeo. Enjoy the podcast.
Welcome to Angel Invest Boston. Conversations with Boston's most interesting angels and founders. Today, we are very privileged to be speaking with Brian Denenberg. Welcome, Brian.
Sal Daher Introduces Brian Denenberg
Brian Denenberg: Thank you for having me.
Sal Daher: Brian is an angel investor and an advisor of companies. He is the co-founder of Venture Lane Studio with Christian Magel of Venture Lane. We're going to start off our conversation by talking about a couple of startups that Brian has been involved with as an investor and advisor that will illustrate some interesting points. Brian's focus is helping early-stage companies with their go-to-market strategy. He's focused on investing in companies that he thinks that he can help in that regard. Anyway, Brian, why don't you lead off with talking about some startups that you've been involved with, what they do, and where they are right now, and how you've worked with them?
Brian Denenberg: I guess with startups, it's always best to go to the ones that I've been with the longest because you start now and in 5 years or 10 years, you know if you're successful, right? I get to go back five years. I would look at two of the earliest companies I worked with. One was Fairmarkit with Kevin Frechette and Tarek. The two founders asked me to join their journey, both as an advisor and as an investor.
Fairmarkit
Sal Daher: Kevin Frechette.
Brian Denenberg: F-R-E-C-H-E-T-T-E.
Sal Daher: Okay. Tarek Alaruri. T-A-R-E-K.
Brian Denenberg: A-L-A-R-U-R-I.
Sal Daher: These gentlemen have founded Fairmarkit. How is Fairmarkit spelled?
Brian Denenberg: F-A-I-R-M-A-R-K-I-T. They're actually a Walnut company. I think the only two people that invested were me and Michael Mark, but they were also a Walnut company.
Sal Daher: I should also mention Brian is also a member of Walnut Ventures. He's a colleague at Walnut Ventures. Anyway, so what does Fairmarkit do?
Brian Denenberg: Originally, and it's been a long time since I've been involved actively, it started off as a procurement for the long tail. Helping companies. 80% of all spending is done on-- 80% of all transactions make up 20% of the spending, but it's also where it's the small spending that there's no process for. This is where a lot of fraud happens and a lot of misuse, not even fraud, but just misuse. They automated that whole process and then they've expanded beyond that, but that was where they started.
Sal Daher: Right. The big items in production are well accounted for in the existing set of systems. Fairmarkit has created a way of understanding the costs of these minor items that can add up substantially.
Brian Denenberg: Yes. I don't want to do a disservice because that was three, four years ago, since I was more actively involved. They've obviously expanded, but that's where they entered into the market. I think what they did really well was figuring out how to enter into the market, into a blue ocean, which was wide open.
Sal Daher: Right. Nobody else. There were no competitors doing what they were doing.
Brian Denenberg: I wouldn't say no, but they didn't have anybody that they couldn't beat, let's put it that way.
Sal Daher: How is it that they progressed in that situation? How is it that they found their customers in that environment?
Brian Denenberg: The two founders had a great sales background from an enterprise sales perspective. They both came from strong enterprise sales backgrounds. Neither of them had been in a startup itself. There was a couple of us advising them that helped them with some of the early-stage issues that they needed to go through, but they had a strong sales background. They built what I would think was a world-class sales organization pretty early on. They brought on some really good people to do that.
Sal Daher: Presumably, Fairmarkit is a SaaS platform that has information about these items and they came from industry. They were quite familiar with the sales process.
Brian Denenberg: They came from sales, but they didn't come from procurement.
Sal Daher: Yes, they did not come from procurement. Okay. You were helping them adjust their background in sales to working in a startup and working in procurement. There's a long distance between doing things in a large corporation and doing things in a startup when your resources are very limited.
Brian Denenberg: Correct. You have to be a lot more scrappy when you're in a startup, obviously. Neither of them had a problem with that.
Sal Daher: No, [chuckles] I've seen this. I've seen people who've worked at large institutions and they're really willing to change the way that they do business just to get their own business off the ground. Many people, especially late-career people have a hard time making that transition because they want to do things the way they're used to doing it for 30 years or whatever. Some people are able to take 10 years of experience in large enterprises and to translate it very successfully to the startup environment, which presumably that was the case here, right?
Brian Denenberg: Yes, you nailed it. I've seen both. I've seen less of where it transfers well. I think you also nailed it that the longer that you're in a large enterprise, the harder that becomes. I'm not saying it's not possible, but it's certainly my experience.
Sal Daher: Do you want to tell us a little bit the story of how Fairmarkit came about?
How Fairmarkit Was Started
Brian Denenberg: I can't do the whole story justice for them, but the two of them had worked together. They found a technical partner and they went out and sold a first client that helped them before they had the product, which I love.
Sal Daher: [laughs] Yes. Okay.
Brian Denenberg: They developed the product with that first client and then started to build a business and went out and found more clients. Stumbled along the way, had some customers that were good customers, some that were bad customers, made some good hires, made some bad hires, and built it like a lot of us do, one brick at a time.
Sal Daher: For the first client, the first client has the advantage of getting a bespoke solution for a problem for which there really is no solution. Dealing with the long tail of expenses at the time was a very open space. There's nothing effective. I can see that trade three very motivated people wanting to work on the problem. Why not? The danger for the startup that I see in that is that they develop a product that is so particular to that industry that it's hard to translate. That was not the case here, apparently.
Brian Denenberg: You nailed it again. I see this all the time is if you're not careful, you become a dev shop for your one client. You really have to be disciplined as to what you're willing to do, what you're not willing to do, what your roadmap is. I'm not a product person, so I don't want to go too far down that road. I think it's great to have somebody advise you on the product if you don't have a lot of product experience. I've seen a lot of companies become mini-dev shops for customers that look very different. Then all of a sudden, you've got to maintain those customers and it's really hard.
Sal Daher: Yes. They have revenue, but it's not a scalable business. It's not a business that's going to grow. It's not a business that angels want to invest in because it's not scalable. They can't make any money.
Brian Denenberg: Forget about angels. There's not going to be angels and you're not going to get the next round of venture because you're going to get to 2 million in revenue or maybe even 5, but you're never going to get to 50. If you are, it's going to be very labor-intensive. You're not going to get the margins.
Sal Daher: You're going to be an agency. It's going to be an agency.
Brian Denenberg: It could be a really good business. There's nothing wrong with that.
Sal Daher: Right, but it's not the sort of business that angels would look to invest in because you cannot scale it and produce very large profits at scale. The profits are going to be linear to the inputs that you put in. You're not going to have exponential return to the inputs. Very good. Do you want to get into Tive, which is the other startup that we discussed? Describe what Tive does, what problem Tive is addressing.
Tive
Brian Denenberg: Yes, again, I'll describe what Tive did when I helped them figure out their messaging and their sales process, and this was five years ago. I still obviously am in touch, very close touch with the co-founder.
Sal Daher: Okay. Let's start with the name of the founder. This one, it's tough. It's Krenar.
Brian Denenberg: Comoni.
Sal Daher: Where is he from?
Brian Denenberg: From Kosovo.
Sal Daher: From Kosovo. Okay.
Sal Daher: C-O-M-O-N-I.
Sal Daher: His first name is Krenar. Is that two Ns on the N-R?
Brian Denenberg: No, just one. It's just K-R-E-N-A-R.
Sal Daher: Tell me about your work with Tive.
Brian Denenberg: I was asked to come in and help them. They had some inbound things figured out. They had figured out some of their messaging in order to get inbound working. At least a lot of leads coming in, a lot of pilots going, but they weren't converting. The sales system was a bit concerned. They didn't really have any revenues, maybe $20,000 in revenue. I came in and helped Krenar figure out a outbound sales process to change who they were selling to. First of all, the persona that they sold to was different when we were going to outbound versus inbound.
Sal Daher: Brian, in the interest of my audience learning, if they're not marketing experts, can you explain inbound marketing, outbound marketing briefly?
Inbound vs Outbound Marketing
Brian Denenberg: Yes. Inbound is you set up your website, you set up your content, you set up things that make the potential customer reach out to you saying, "I have that problem."
Sal Daher: Create compelling content so when people do a search, your content shows up explaining the problem and you become sort of an authority. You have high SEO, search engine authority or search engine optimization authority for your articles, so you get a lot of traffic of people with inquiries about this problem. That's inbound. Outbound is--
Brian Denenberg: Me reaching out to you, sending an email, making a phone call, reaching out on LinkedIn, interrupting your day, interrupting your day, the jerk that interrupts your day. There's a big difference and there's a lot of speak in the market that outbound is dead, et cetera. First of all, that wasn't true five years ago and I still don't believe it's true.
Sal Daher: It's the dirty secret. HubSpot always admits, outbound, that's how you get started. Your inbound strategy, you have to have an emailing list to start with. Ultimately your inbound strategy is about building a mailing list that you're then going to-- Yes, there's outbound nurturing of your prospects, of your leads, but in the end, the sales are always going to be outbound.
Brian Denenberg: In this particular case, and I've seen this over and over again, in this particular case, we were talking to the person who was calling in or coming to us, and I like to put it this way. Think of somebody throwing a chair across the room, screaming about a problem not being solved, which hopefully no bosses are doing anymore.
Sal Daher: [laughs] Is Phil Knight still at the--
Brian Denenberg: I went to Indiana. That's why I used that analogy. That's actually Tarek is how we got in touch from Fairmarkit because he wrestled for Indiana. The person contacting you from inbound, sometimes, not always, is the person who's getting the chair thrown at them, and that's the crude analogy I used. I want to talk to the person who actually has the problem and who's throwing the chair, and it's a figurative analogy. I want to talk to the person who really feels that problem.
It's affecting their job day to day whether or not their job survives or their company survives. By doing an outbound, we can actually target that person, that persona really well. What we did there, we found out that Krenar and Tive had built this really amazing product that was completely over-engineered, and he had to redo the product.
To his genius, he was able to redo it with limited budget and very quickly. Once he did that, he narrowed his market focus, because by doing outbound, he realized he had a reverse logistics problem. In other words, he would send the trackers out, and I can explain what the business does in it if you want.
Sal Daher: Provide that context.
"... What Tive did, he innovated a tracker that goes on shipments, and it could go anywhere in the world, and it could not just tell you where the shipment was. It could tell you the condition of the shipment..."
Brian Denenberg: Yes, so he would send the trackers out, but they wouldn't come back. What Tive did, he innovated a tracker that goes on shipments, and it could go anywhere in the world, and it could not just tell you where the shipment was. It could tell you the condition of the shipment. What that meant is it could tell you if it was humid, if it was shock, if you opened the door to the container and there was light, so if someone was stealing something on the highway. It could tell you the heat. It would tell you all the conditions, at the time, seven or eight different conditions. That made it really interesting so that a shipper could say, "Oh, I'm having a problem with things getting broken, and I now can see exactly where it's being shocked. We can change our lanes. We can change how we [crosstalk] ."
Sal Daher: It's a rail yard in Oakland [laughs] .
Brian Denenberg: It's a rail yard or the doors are getting open and the goods are getting stolen at that spot on the highway. Let's stop using that highway, or the person shipping it is stealing. Whatever it might be.
There's a million use cases. Obviously, the business is advanced and they've got analytics and they've got all kinds of software tools that go along with it. Since then, it's built it up to well above 20 million in revenue. The company's booming is at $300 million valuation doing great. Needed to figure out in order to get to where he's at, had to get through that bump in the road.
Sal Daher: Yes. Yes. Inbound interests can be deceptive. I was an early investor in SQZ Biotech. They went public. They've done tremendous stuff. They raise a lot of money and they're public and then it's biotech winter right now and they're not doing great, but still a very interesting story. They did amazing things, but early on, they had very strong inbound interest for their technology from labs all across the country because they were in a very prestigious lab, the Langer Lab at MIT. Klavs Jensen was a guy heading the lab and it's associated with the Langer Lab.
Everybody wanted to use that technique for cell transformation for re-engineering cells. They thought they had a business with that. They raised a million dollars from the angels and nine months later, they realized that just that there was no way they could make that into business because the technology is just not ready, it was too early. The economics didn't work out because they had to fiddle with the process so much to get it to work on someone else's lab, and then they bought a few hundred dollars of consumables. It was not economical, but it took them nine months to understand that they had to go in a different direction in order to develop.
That sort of seared in my mind that inbound interest can be really deceptive and you have to look at it from the context of how can you take that inbound interest and make it economic. I guess from your perspective, so you want to know what's behind it, you really want to get down to the underlying problem and figure it out. In this case, yes, they really should have gotten down to the-- in this case, it was a problem of self-knowledge. They didn't know how undeveloped their product was at the time. I'm talking about the case of SQZ.
Brian Denenberg: Oh right.
Sal Daher: Yes. Yes. In the case of Tive, they didn't really know the real pain points of the real people who had the problems. They were getting signals via someone else who perhaps would distort the signal.
Brian Denenberg: For SQZ, what's interesting about that story, and I don't know it obviously like you do, but what's interesting about that is there was a pain and that's what they were getting interest on. It seems like it was a real pain, but they were unable to deliver a product with economics that work.
Sal Daher: Today, they could do it, but it's too late. That's a different market.
Brian Denenberg: If you spend too much money going down that road and not figuring out early, "Is this a problem that is solvable technically? Is there a technical risk?"
"... Scientists don't know the huge difference that exists between the lab and the clinic and industry. There's a massive gap and they think that something that works in the lab will work in a clinic or an industry very easily, but it mostly does not..."
Sal Daher: They could do it, but the problem is they couldn't do it economically because the technology is just too undeveloped. It's the thing that Jeff Arnold always says. Scientists don't know the huge difference that exists between the lab and the clinic and industry. There's a massive gap and they think that something that works in the lab will work in a clinic or an industry very easily, but it mostly does not because stuff that's going on in the lab is discovery. It's in the edges of knowledge and conditions are all perfect.
Brian Denenberg: I don't touch biotech. I touch medtech that is on the periphery of it, but once it comes to any FDA approval, I, for the most part, try to stay away from it.
Sal Daher: I also like to stay away from FDA approval. That's why I like biotech because biotech is really about the technologies you're selling to strategics who are then going to do the FDA. Let the strategics do the FDA stuff because they have all the knowledge there. Anyway, complete the story a little bit here on Tive. What is it that you figured out when you actually got into touch with the people who had the pain points?
Brian Denenberg: One is what the right target markets were. Who was going to make a buying decision quickly? With a really early stage, and I can give you lots of really interesting case studies, with really early stage, sometimes it's not about going after the market that you think is the perfect opportunity. It's about going after the market that is open to buying from you now. For example, one of the hypotheses at the time, I believe, was high-value shipments. There was a lot of money in the container, and so you're willing to spend money to protect it. That led down some wrong roads. We thought pharma would be good because those products are super-- If something can go wrong, they have a life timeline and you spend a lot of money. Actually, it worked against us at the time because it was so valuable, they were willing to airship it [chuckles] .
Sal Daher: It wasn't an issue, right?
Brian Denenberg: It wasn't. We spent a lot of time figuring-- When I say a lot of time, in those days, maybe two weeks or three weeks going and trying to bang on that door.
Sal Daher: It had to be just the right level of being high value. It had to be high value, but not so high that you can ship it by air.
Brian Denenberg: Now, I believe that they're going after that. Again, this was when they were sub 1 million and sub 100,000. Now, they go after a lot more industries that I would have excluded at that time.
Sal Daher: Excellent. What was your role in helping him do that?
Brian Denenberg: I was an advisor.
Sal Daher: Okay.
Brian Denenberg: My trademark is I always try to say, "I'm there to help you get to the first 3 million in revenue." With most, I stick around as an advisor to the CEO after that. Sometimes they'll take some of-- I run a service business called sales centers, and sometimes we use sales centers, did a lot of the recruiting for them. Sometimes the companies will outsource the sales process to us, the BDR work or some of the research work to our teams. We've got about 30 people.
Sal Daher: BDR is Business Development Representative.
Brian Denenberg: Yes. Those are the people who will be making the phone calls, sending the emails, managing LinkedIn campaigns, getting meetings for complex sales organizations or closing the sales for transactional organizations.
Sal Daher: Okay. Let's talk about Venture Lane Studio.
Venture Lane Studio
Brian Denenberg: Yes.
Sal Daher: The listeners are familiar with Venture Lane. We interviewed Christian Magel at Venture Lane. It's a workplace here in Boston. Christian Magel is a tremendous support to founders. He himself is a very successful founder in the mobile telephony space. Now, he has this very positive and supportive environment at Venture Lane. Anybody who can should pay a visit to Venture Lane. It's an exciting place. Anyway, tell me how Venture Lane Studio came about.
Brian Denenberg: Christian and I had both-- There was a couple of companies that we both knew. I believe one that you may have invested in Federico Cismondi from doDoc. I was working with Federico very early on. I was going into his office and Christian and Federico were having a conversation.
Sal Daher: By the way, you can look up Federico Cismondi, doDoc. I interviewed him twice. What doDoc did is a platform for creating highly accountable documents for people who needed that accountability down to the sentence level. Who changed this sentence, when, microseconds has changed. It was highly accountable. You could figure out. Basically, it was like a database with all the data that you could just assemble into a document and make it intelligible to humans. At the same time, you could know exactly what version you had. It's like Google Docs but on steroids for enterprises that have multi-million pages. The alternative is like a million-page PDF that a drug company might submit to the FDA [laughs] .
Brian Denenberg: Google Docs, you couldn't use at the time because it wasn't secure in the same way. Then the Word documents, you'd have a million versions. It was truly enterprise edition of Google Doc. That's the best way to put it from a lay perspective.
Sal Daher: Yes. Anyway, the company was bought because they built a very successful client base and they showed that proved the value of what they were offering. Anyway you were going--
Brian Denenberg: I was walking into the office and Christian was sitting there and I had heard of Christian from a couple other people, from Clement from Techstars and a couple other people said, "You need to meet Christian. He's looking at doing some really interesting things." He had heard of me from some of the same people.
We finally bumped into each other and Federico said, "You have to talk to Brian. He can help you with what you want to do." We got to talking and we launched a course together just to test out what it was like to work together. We liked working together. We were going to launch Venture Lane Studio in March of 2020. Some reason why the world didn't want that to happen at that time [chuckles] .
Sal Daher: I don't remember what happened.
Brian Denenberg: I don't remember why, but I just remember it didn't work out.
Sal Daher: I don't know. It was a very strange period.
Brian Denenberg: Yes. We stayed close and we launched it almost two years ago. I had been very active and we also were both mentors in Techstars. I think I was more active. I was a mentor in residence. We really got to know each other and see each other's work, if you will. Very complimentary because he's got a strong marketing background and is very strategic in his thinking. He's very more operational than I am. We decided to launch it together.
Sal Daher: Great. Great. How does Venture Lane Studio work?
"... We call it a studio. It gives us the flexibility to work in different ways. The best way to think of it is like an accelerator. It's really bespoke. We take three to four companies at a time. We're not looking to doing big cohorts..."
Brian Denenberg: We call it a studio. It gives us the flexibility to work in different ways. The best way to think of it is like an accelerator. It's really bespoke. We take three to four companies at a time. We're not looking to doing big cohorts. We have mentors, but we're--
Sal Daher: You're not challenging the dominance of Y Combinator.
Brian Denenberg: No, not at all. I wish from an economic perspective, but it's not the model I enjoy. All three of us, Jeffrey, Christian and I, and Ross all love rolling our sleeves up.
Sal Daher: Jeffrey?
Brian Denenberg: Jeffrey Beir, B-E-I-R.
Sal Daher: Jeffrey, B-E-I-R, Jeffrey Beir. The three of you enjoy taking on three companies at a time. What are your criteria for someone to join Venture Lane Studio?
Brian Denenberg: The way we like to put it is you've got a product. You think you're a product market fit [chuckles] . We want to test that. If you don't think of it, that's fine because we probably don't either. You've got a couple sales, hopefully, but you haven't figured out a repeatable process yet.
You haven't really figured the outbound or inbound so that it's working repeatedly. We just launched last week with three great companies, and all have customers, all have a product. We're helping them, in different cases, that they each have different needs, but often narrow their focus, set up some processes for sales, and work with them. Sometimes some product areas. Jeffrey's got a strong product background because you can't change a process if the product needs a little work as well, so sometimes we'll get involved in that.
Sal Daher: Are you at liberty to discuss briefly these three companies?
Cedience
Brian Denenberg: Sure. I'm happy to. The first is Cedience.
Sal Daher: How is that spelled?
Brian Denenberg: C-E-D-I-E-N-C-E.
Sal Daher: What are they doing?
Brian Denenberg: I'll give the quick pitch. For them is $85 billion a year is lost for pharma companies because of regulation adjustments that they should have been able to predict. Requirements that they should have been able to predict. This is an AI to help companies instantly find out what regulatory issues they may run into.
Sal Daher: It's AI for compliance.
Brian Denenberg: AI for regulatory compliance. They're currently selling it into some of the big pharma companies already. I've never seen somebody selling into pharma with such short sales cycles, which is brilliant. Sometimes three to six weeks. We're working with them to create a process to increase the number of companies that they work with, but then also create how to expand within those companies. Really strong background in science, strong background in the industry, not a strong sales background. We're working with them on that.
Sal Daher: Excellent. Next company.
CIRT
Brian Denenberg: The next is CIRT. Stands for Can I Recycle This, C-I-R-T. You might have heard that there'll be more plastic in the ocean in 2050 than fish.
Sal Daher: Right, because the reality is only 5% of plastic gets recycled. The rest of it just gets thrown into dumps, or worse, into the ocean.
Brian Denenberg: That research, the people who wrote that research are the two founders of this company.
Sal Daher: Oh, wow.
Brian Denenberg: Yes. What CIRT does is it's a platform, it's a circulatory platform. What I love about it is when they sell to a company, the company gets all the suppliers on board as part of the contract, and then they can go sell to all the suppliers who then can go get all their customers on board. That cycle just can keep repeating. It's $2.3 trillion of plastic goes back into the earth, not in the right way, every year. That's just plastic. We are working with them to focus into a more narrow-- How do you go after a $2.3 trillion sub-market? The beverage industry, they already have four beer companies on board and I think there's a huge opportunity here. Just the beverage market is a billion-dollar opportunity. That's the nice beachhead market.
Sal Daher: Just because you throw it in the recycle bin doesn't mean it gets recycled. Only 5% of the plastics. Paper, glass, metal, all that gets recycled. Very high percentage, but the reality is, with plastic, it's still extremely expensive. The third.
Qase
Brian Denenberg: Then the third is it's called Qase, Q-A-S-E. It's a legal platform. It can go well beyond this but it starts off as a referral for lawyers. They found a nice niche market which is they sell to the bar associations who all have referral services and that's how a lot of lawyers get their business through referral. Now, they have all of the lawyers on the system, so we're working with them, again, to focus and do an expansion plan to really go after the bar associations and the referral services aggressively.
Sal Daher: Interesting.
Brian Denenberg: They already have 1600 lawyers on it that can get referrals and they're really just getting started.
Sal Daher: Very interesting. Very interesting. Brian, I thought what we might do at this point is a brief promo for the podcast, and then we might get into a little bit about your career, how you got to where you are today. If you are finding this conversation with Brian Denenberg, angel investor and advisor to companies on sales, helpful, please help other people find it. The way you can do that is first, subscribe to the podcast whatever platform you're on, so the podcast shows up on your feed every week. Number two, leave a written review. Okay? It doesn't have to be much. As long as you take a little bit of trouble to write, it tells the algorithm that selects what gets shown to people in the platform that this is an episode that is of interest.
You'd be surprised, Brian, one or two written reviews of an episode can 2X or 3X the downloads that week. The week your podcast launches, I recommend, the day it launches, go to platform, wherever you listen to podcasts, and leave a review and a rating, of course. My mom always told me, "Ask for five-star ratings," but the written review--
Brian Denenberg: Your mom was ahead of her time.
[laughter]
Sal Daher: My mom was the Mediterranean version of a tiger mom, I guess a leopard mom. I don't know what the feline is that's appropriate for that. God bless her soul. Anyway, the point here is that these conversations are created in order for people to learn. The more people find out about this, the more helpful we are to helping technology companies do business in a better way, and therefore, really help the world. You're helping the world by doing a review and a rating and following us.
Brian Denenberg: Great sales pitch. [laughter] "You're saving the world by leaving a review." I love it.
Sal Daher: You are. Believe it or not, these little things can make a huge difference.
Brian Denenberg: I agree with you.
Sal Daher: There's a video of a Ted talk of this guy. It was a college in Canada. He had a nonprofit and he was standing in line with a freshman trying to sign them up to buy the raffle tickets for his nonprofit. There was this guy in line, and there was a young woman right behind him. They were standing in line to register. He says to the young man and says, "Why don't you buy a ticket for the lady here?" He bought her a ticket, and so forth. This guy was a student also. Three years later, he gets a call from the young woman. She says, "You know the guy you introduced me to that day, we're getting married."
Brian Denenberg: That's fantastic.
Sal Daher: Just a stupid low-rate sales pitch, "Buy a raffle ticket for the young lady here."
Brian Denenberg: You never know how you're going to change the world, right?
Sal Daher: You never know. Follow and leave a review, and maybe you'll introduce a happy couple somewhere.
Brian Denenberg: Excellent.
Sal Daher: [laughs] Brian, where did you grow up, by the way?
Brian's Background
Brian Denenberg: From a suburb of Detroit. I grew up just outside of Detroit, Michigan.
Sal Daher: What did your parents do?
Brian Denenberg: My father was a lawyer. My mother originally was a teacher, but then after I think three kids, I was the fourth, stayed home to look after us, but my father was a successful lawyer born in 1930. Fought his way up and showed me the hard work, but also the rewards of owning your own business. I always saw that from a little kid.
Sal Daher: He had his own practice?
Brian Denenberg: He had his own practice.
Sal Daher: Excellent. Excellent. When did you discover that you had a talent for sales?
Brian Denenberg: I had a business in college, and it was not my first business. I called my brother-in-law and asked him what I needed. I had scheduled my first meeting with a potential customer and he said, "Well, just throw a bunch of stuff against the wall. Something'll stick." That was the beginning of my sales career [laughs] .
Sal Daher: The spaghetti approach. Spaghetti against the wall.
Brian Denenberg: Exactly. A couple of years later, I worked at The Economist. Actually, they gave me some professional training.
Sal Daher: What were you doing for The Economist?
Brian Denenberg: The Economist has this division called the Economist Intelligence Unit.
Sal Daher: Oh, yes.
Brian Denenberg: They have a conference unit that has these large conferences, but then also has these memberships, or at least at the time they did. We had a business China group, a regional managers club for Latin America, for Asia, et cetera. I sold those memberships in the-- I was living in Hong Kong. They hired me to move to New York, and then they moved me back to Asia to sell them in Hong Kong, in China.
Sal Daher: You're in college in the US. The next thing you say, you're in Hong Kong.
Brian Denenberg: How did you get to Hong Kong? I hopped on a plane and stayed on someone's floor for six weeks until I found a job.
Sal Daher: This is like my business partner, Bob Smith, who went to the Middle East fresh out of law school. His father wanted him to start law practice [chuckles] . This guy goes gallivanting in the Middle East and starts a distressed sovereign debt brokerage business, and makes himself a fortune.
Brian Denenberg: Yes, once you've lived that life a little bit, you meet a lot of people like that.
Sal Daher: Get out and travel. It's a good idea to go someplace, unfamiliar territory, you may discover stuff. Anyway, Economist Intelligence Unit, sales, what did you do next after that?
Brian Denenberg: When they moved me back to Hong Kong-- They originally moved me to New York and they moved me back to Hong Kong, and I thought I'd stay there forever. I originally went for a year and then stayed for 20, and ended up in Singapore. I lived in Beijing for a while but ended up in Singapore.
Sal Daher: I've lived in Singapore as well. Totally different perspective of the world living out there.
Brian Denenberg: It's great. Then in 2015, I helped a bunch of companies set up sales teams in Asia. Some couple of small public companies that had just gone public and then wanted to launch in Asia. I would be the person they would hire to set up the team in Asia.
Sal Daher: You did that in your own practice?
Brian Denenberg: No, I would do that as an employee. Then the three of the companies I worked for, I was co-founder of them.
Sal Daher: Okay. You founded a bunch of companies that were helping small publicly listed companies?
Brian Denenberg: No, those were jobs. Then I would leave those jobs. I left that job and I started a company. Actually, we developed a publishing company, developed a research company.
Sal Daher: Interesting. Bring us to today. How did you become interested in working with startups?
How Brian Got into Startups
Brian Denenberg: When I moved back, I invested in my old business partner's company and I helped him set up, which you may remember, YayPay, Anthony Venus from YayPay.
Sal Daher: Yes. That was a very successful company, yes.
Brian Denenberg: I helped him set up the US for a year. What I realized---
Sal Daher: Tell us a little bit what YayPay did.
Brian Denenberg: YayPay is an accounts receivable management. Think of HubSpot for accounts receivable. Before YayPay, your accounts receivable team will sit there and send out emails and make phone calls off of spreadsheets. You give the same attention to everybody, but software should be able to tell you that, "Bob is a bad payer, so you better stay on top of him. Sally, she's pretty good. She's always a day late. Don't worry about it. If she's five days late, just give her an email. If she's 10 days late, give her a call." I'm simplifying it and that was again, six years, seven years ago.
Sal Daher: Eventually, what happened with YayPay?
Brian Denenberg: It got bought, yes. Like a lot of companies, it got bought. They did well.
Sal Daher: Great. Then after that exit?
Brian Denenberg: I decided I really like the stage of figuring out your first messaging and figuring out your first process and setting that up. I didn't necessarily need to go in and do that 100% of the time for one company. I could work with 4 or 5 companies or 10 companies and just do that piece that I really like doing. I found that was my sweet spot. I had some success at it, so I guess I must be okay at it. I found a bunch of companies that wanted me to do that. I built a consulting business. On the back of that, I launched the recruiting and services business.
Sal Daher: After you do something for a dozen times, you figure out what aspect of it you're good at, what aspect of it is not for you. Then you just buckle down on the stuff that you're good at and then you develop an expertise, a real expertise.
Brian Denenberg: Also, if you do something for long enough, the stuff that you're not good at, you might get good at. [laughter]
Sal Daher: That's all it is. There's some things that you can be really good at immediately and some other things might take time. Anyway, Brian, so in the interest of keeping with our format, are there any concluding thoughts that you have for our audience of angels and founders that you want to leave with them?
Advice to the Audience
Brian Denenberg: I'm going to go with what Christian and I always say is-
Sal Daher: That's Christian Magel.
Brian Denenberg: -we believe that sales is the one thing that you can't fake and that if you get that right-- It's not to say that you can't fail, but it's the one metric that we think really matters.
[music]
Sal Daher: At the end of the day, if you've got a product ready to go, you have to have a good sales process to get the full value out of it. Tremendous. Brian Denenberg, angel, advisor, thanks for being on the Angel Invest Boston podcast.
Brian Denenberg: Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.
Sal Daher: To our listeners, thanks for listening. I'm Sal Daher.
I'm glad you were able to join us. Our engineer is Raul Rosa. Our theme was composed by John McKusick. Our graphic design is by Katharine Woodman-Maynard. Our host is coached by Grace Daher.